As China's Role in the World Changes, So Does Mandarin's Role in China

The Chinese national identity has long been tied up with its language, for natives and foreigners alike.

A Beijing woman looks at a poster promoting the use of Mandarin and Chinese characters. It reads, "The country promotes Mandarin and pushes to standardize Chinese characters." (Reuters)

There's an experience common to many first-time visitors to
China, who often recount it with surprise, delight, and a sense of discovering
something uniquely Chinese. It happens when they utter their first sentence in
mandarin to a Chinese stranger -- a taxi driver, a watermelon vendor, or an old
man practicing water calligraphy in the park -- and see the person's face
instantly light up in amazement. That amazement might turn to reverence if the
speaker can demonstrate even a shaky comfort with the language.Waiguoren
-- foreigners -- are no longer a rare sight in many parts of this briskly
modernizing country, and with the worldwide boom in studying Chinese, an
increasing number of them bring language skills. While the novelty is wearing
off, Chinese continue to be fascinated by foreigners able to speak their mother
tongue. It's a fun moment of cross-cultural bonding, but it's also a product of
China's complicated relationship with its own language, which for centuries has
been tied up with its national identity. As China and its place in the world
are changing, so is the meaning of the Chinese language for natives and
foreigners alike.

Most recently, this fascination manifested in Chinese web
user's reactions to (and obsessive viewing of) a
viral Internet video, in which a young half-Caucasian, half-Asian American
impersonates 12 different characters, among them a Beijinger, a Hong Kong
Chinese, a Taiwanese, a New Yorker, an African American, and a score of non-Chinese
foreigners speaking English with exaggerated native accents. His immaculate Chinese
and jarringly precise grasp of the slangs, accents, and subtleties in the language's
regional variations amazed his Chinese audience. "What are you trying to do?"
Some users, pinching a line from his skit, asked on
Weibo, where the video, which has over 5 million views on Youku, has been
forwarded more than 435,000 times.

The Chinese language has long been a point of pride for its
people, a sense that often comes through when they tell foreigners, smilingly,
that Chinese is too hard to learn as a second language. They're telling the
truth, which they have lived themselves through years of hunching over their
desks in school, scribbling thousands of characters and memorizing Chengyu, special four-character Chinese aphorisms
that gives one's speech a cultivated air. For foreigners, learning Chinese can require
even more fortitude and patience, a subject eloquently explained in this essay famous among
Chinese learners, "Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard." The author, an English-speaker
struggling to learn Chinese, posits that native speakers "generally become
aware at some point of the Everest-like status of their native language, as
they, from their privileged vantage point on the summit, observe foolhardy
foreigners huffing and puffing up the steep slopes"

A deeper reason for the extraordinary pride that Chinese
people take in their language lies in their view of it as a symbol of the
nation's glorious history and blooming civilization. Chinese is one of the
oldest known writings in the world, inscribed on animal bones that date
back to 4,500 years ago, possibly earlier.
It is one of the only logographic languages still widely used in the world, a
writing system of pictorial symbols, each intended to look like the thing or
idea it stands for. The language's consistent structural principles allow the
modern descendants to converse directly with their distant ancestors, and
create a remarkable sense of historical continuity that smoothes over the
wrinkles of wars and dynasties. At any point in history, it has also been a
powerful unifying force, tightly weaving ethnic groups under the rule of the
empire and a common national identity. To neighboring countries that admired
the civilization of the Middle Kingdom, the langauge was a form of soft power
that they absorbed, incorporating Chinese into their own languages. Modern
Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese all contain some linguistic traces of China's cultural
influence.

Recent history, however, complicates Chinese people's
relationship with their language. After repeated defeats by foreigners in the early
20th century, the Chinese began to question the traditional ways that had not
saved them, including their sacred script. Scholars in the 1910s called it the
greatest impediment to literacy and democracy, and even discussed
switching the language to Esperanto or adopting the Latin alphabet. Most
ambitious of them all, Mao Zedong, famously told the American journalist Edgar
Snow in 1936, "Sooner or later, we believe, we will have to abandon characters
altogether if we are to create a new social culture in which the masses fully
participate." He might have replaced all Chinese characters with the Latin
alphabet, had Joseph Stalin not convinced him that a nation as great as China
should have its own form of writing instead of borrowing another culture's. The
chaos of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution further exhausted
the momentum for language reform, and by late 1970s, people had lost all interest
in radical, top-down change. Chinese characters, saved by a foreign dictator
and a series of domestic anti-traditionalist movements, survived to be passed
on to the next generation.

China's centuries-long status as the superpower of Asia, followed
by its still-fresh memory of the century of humiliation imposed by foreign nations
-- a trajectory epitomized in the fate of the Chinese language -- help instill
in its people a strong national identity and an "us versus them" mindset. When
foreigners speak Chinese, they are crossing this invisible identity boundary, still
largely demarcated by the Chinese language. It is a phenomenon that can be fascinating,
and perhaps a bit disorienting, for a Chinese listener to experience.

As flocks of foreigners enroll in Chinese language schools
and universities, Chinese people often read this as a positive statement about their
modern society, proof of both China's expanding international clout and the
resilience of its culture; proof that, even after being trampled by foreign
powers and destructive political movements, China still has not lost its appeal,
its place in the world. This reassurance carries special significance at this
moment in China's history, a time when Chinese students are pouring hours into
English lessons instead of classical Chinese poetry, when Chinese workers are
building American products for foreign consumers, and when, for example,
Chinese movie-goers are spending more money on foreign blockbusters likeTitanic
3D. "I am sad that our predecessors destroyed our culture ... but did not
build a beautiful new world," the well-known blogger Han Han recently wrote. "As one
from the younger generation, none of us know if we are ever able to make up for
everything."

The Chinese government, too, seems to realize that its
aggressive campaign to push soft power abroad must also deal with the
difficulty of the Chinese language, which is once labeled "a Great Wall erected
between the masses and the new culture." It has established Confucius Institutes
and Confucius Classrooms -- government-run cultural outposts that teach Chinese
language and history -- in more than 700 locations worldwide, including many
American universities, and supplied them with a steady stream of
Beijing-trained and -financed language teachers. Many universities in the U.S. turned
down the offer for fear of government censorship, but others, wishing to expand
their Chinese education on the cheap, embraced them. "The Chinese are very
clear on what they are trying to achieve," Martin Davidson, chief executive of
the British Council told
theNew York Times. "They want to change the perception of China -- to
combat negative propaganda with positive propaganda."

When the first-discovered piece of animal bone inscribed
with ancient Chinese characters was found in 1899, China was disintegrating
into the hands of Western powers, and the proto-nationalist Boxer rebels were slaughtering
missionaries and diplomats in retaliation. More than 100 years later, these
events have become history lessons in China's classrooms, as the government courts
the West with Chinese language and culture. "Sanshinian hedong, sanshinian hexi," as they may have taught the
foreigners, "30 years east of the river, 30 years west of the river." Or as the
Americans say, every dog has its day.

When left to the hands of its speakers, Chinese becomes the cursive
characters tumbling down the red scrolls on families' front door during Spring
Festival, or the snarky, catchy phrases that fill its modern pop music. Or it
is the syllables uttered by a foreigner to a taxi driver, a watermelon vendor,
or an old man practicing water calligraphy in the park, and instantly lighting
up his or her face.